


if there is love (at the end of everything)

by cicak



Series: Coronavirus Decameron (WIP Amnesty 2020) [1]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Apocalypse, Creeping Dread, M/M, Psychological Horror, Solitude, WIP amnesty 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-16
Updated: 2020-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:42:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23177155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cicak/pseuds/cicak
Summary: There was nothing in the records to indicate that anything had changed.
Relationships: Poe Dameron/Finn
Series: Coronavirus Decameron (WIP Amnesty 2020) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1666177
Comments: 9
Kudos: 24





	if there is love (at the end of everything)

There was no indication at first that anything was wrong. Poe has gone over the telemetry a thousand times in the months since he arrived. There was nothing in the records to indicate that anything had changed. 

“Black leader to tower - requesting permission to land”.

Silence.

“Come in, tower”

Silence.

There is no interference on the line, no evidence of anything. The sky above D’Qar was clear of any other ships on the radar or on visual, and the sensors showed no evidence of any jumps to lightspeed in the last day or so. He had left twelve hours ago, on a basic mission to rendezvous with someone who never showed. He remembers being irritable, tired and hungry and in desperate need to stretch his legs. 

There were X-Wings parked neatly both in their bays and across the secondary runway they use as a graveyard, but not in pieces; there was no evidence of them being abandoned. The tarps that protect the broken fighters from further damage were still intact, waiting for a time when they could be restored, still firmly strapped in place, bright orange and looking like a lumpkin patch from the air.

He scanned the whole planet, looking for signatures of something, anything, that indicated what had happened. How a whole base could just disappear. But nothing showed up. 

He only lands when his fuel gauge hit the red, and parked up in his normal space. He stayed in the cockpit for as long as possible, before climbing out.

The first indication that this wasn’t an elaborate prank was the silence in the hanger. The hanger was never empty. Even in the middle of a sleep cycle there are always droids going about their routines, refuelling, cleaning, sharpening tools, resupplying the fighters and the supply bins. The hanger is also the centre of the informal short cut route through the base - anyone leaving the barracks who has been in the resistance for more than a day always cut across the back corner instead of walking all the way round. That door had been wedged open from the first day they arrived on base, despite the fire hazard warnings and the handwritten, sweary signs put up by the mechanics.

Now, the droids are gone, the door is shut. The signs lie in a dusty pile, as if knocked down by an errant, dismissive hand. The only sound for the last few months was the plinking of the cooling metal of his X-Wing, and the slow beep of BB-8 doing her end of flight checks, and once those faded, that was that. 

Even now, every hair stands on end at the silence. Then, in a panic he was determined to go through his end of mission routine. He remembers the shock of showering in the echoing communal baths, their tiles dry for once. He went back to his rooms, plugged in BB-8 to her docking station, downloaded the telemetry to his workstation. Dressed in civvies, a worn t-shirt and sparring pants, threadbare at the knees, thick winter socks and, after a moment of indecision, his old marching boots from basic training. They are brown leather and as close to a teddy bear as he still has, thick rubber soles making him feel grounded. He once did the calculations in his head and figured he had walked halfway to Yavin 4’s nearest moon in them over the years. He likes calculations, likes silly math. 

It is still warm in the base, the heaters still working, humming away quietly, but other than that the signs of life are missing, the doors stuck half open and the computers in the war room blank, unable to power on, but otherwise the base seems stale, yet cleaner and more organised than he had ever seen it. 

“Did the war end?” he said out loud to no one, and the echoes only taunted him in return. (It was the last thing he said out loud for a long time.)

The mess was designed to be used in times of low power, and so inside the galley the stoves spring to life at a touch of their mechanical buttons, gas piped in from a huge collector out beyond the trees. There were plenty of non-perishables, and the fridgers were still cool as long as the door was kept closed, and so that first night he made a feast of everything he could get his hands on that looked close to turning, a strange, indulgent meal of the thick, well marbled meat saved for special occasions, a bowl of seafood soup, some half wilting greens that perked up under the steamer, a baker’s dozen of the cheese pastries he always liked, but would never eat on a normal day.

He was ravenous, and it smelled so good, but when he tried to step out into the mess hall, the enormity of the loss hit him like ejecting during a crash. He spilled most of the soup recoiling back into the galley, breathing hard, skin crawling at the wrongness of the whole situation. 

He eats standing up, back to the wall, eyes on the door, and for all of how good it smelled, somehow it tasted like ash.

* * *

Since then he purposefully doesn’t mark the days because he is so sure that there is an explanation for everything that has happened. Someone is bound to turn up, explain it all, tell him the date, and it won’t matter.

By the time he starts counting, he doesn’t really know how long he has been walking the halls. He’s kept busy; tuned up all the x-wings, sorted all the papers, and tried to keep a schedule by doing something unique every day, but still the days bleed into one another, sleep and meals only snatched when his body screams for them. It’s been maybe ten days, if he really thinks hard about it, counts the dreams, does the math. There have been no changes in the seasons yet, and the light hasn’t changed, so it hasn’t been a month. D’qar spins fast, faster than any other planet he’s ever lived on, and has a biome that gets bored easily, and so flowers burst into bloom and fade into memory in the space of days. He never studied botany though, and so when he sees a yellow trumpet flower outside the ‘fresher window, he doesn’t know what it means.

But ten, ten is a good place to start counting. 

He keeps BB-8 turned off. Her batteries should be good for several years in hibernation, and her backup module should keep her personality in the data banks for longer than he’ll ever live. Still, she is power hungry, she needs to be charged every day, more if her servos have been working over time. He can fly an x-wing without her as long as he doesn’t go to light speed, but he doesn’t want to leave the planet yet. 

For the first few months, things are fine. He eventually gets into the habit of talking to himself constantly, narrating everything he does, singing everything else, keeping the vocal cords warm and ticking over. He keeps the base in good condition, cleaning up after himself, dragging dust sheets out of storage to cover everything that might get damaged by time, knocking on the doors of private quarters before entering out of respect for their absent owners.

Poe knows his memory is going. He doesn’t really know if he remembers to make a tally mark each day. Sometimes he looks at one of the stacks of papers in the General’s office (he’s in there to water the plants, nothing more), and the writing isn’t what he remembers, the ink a different colour. The details of the supply runs change, for different amounts, different personnel assigned than he remembers. He runs his fingers over unfamiliar names and tries to recall faces, dates they joined, their favourite foods. For all he reads the books he salvaged from the med bay about isolation and the prisoner’s holoprojector phenomenon, the flickers he sees out the corner of his eye are his mind playing tricks on him, but he falls for them every time, stalking phantoms round corners, going on wild goose chases that end up taking up hours out of his day.

There is still food, plenty of food. He doesn’t need to ration it. There are enough blasters and morpha kicking around to have his choice of death if he does ever run out. The hope swirls around his brain, resilient after all these years. 

He plays at being the caretaker, the good soldier, until he breaks. According to the tally it is day 193, and if all is correct, it is his life day.

He boots up BB-8 as a treat. He just wants to talk to someone who isn’t himself for just one day, one blasted day.

She completes her boot sequence, and plays a little fanfare. 

[Master?] she says, her head swivelling round to see him. [It has been 222 days since my last successful boot. Do you wish to run diagnostics?]

“Its okay, B” he says. His voice sounds croaky from underuse, which shouldn’t be possible. Or is it? Has he been talking in his head the last few days? He can’t remember. “We can do it tomorrow. I’m celebrating my life day today. Do you want to go for a ride?”

She beeps a contented fanfare, and the sound of her servos against the concrete floor brings tears to his eyes.

He has been planning this for days. There is a market planet, Tavia, a short lightspeed hop from D’qar. It had always had Imperial ties, and so while the resistance were tolerated, their republican masters never were, so they would generally only pick up small sundries from Tavia, and get their main refuel from one of the bigger commerce systems, where anonymous business was better tolerated. Tavia dealt in gossip and idle speculation more than intelligence, but with only limited battery power at his disposal, he had saved this. 

From the air the D’qar base looked small and sad. Despite his best efforts the ravages of the rainforest were taking their toll. 

“Prepare to jump now, BB-8” he says, and feels the pull in the pit of his stomach as she does.

They get to Tavia and find it in ruins. Always a small outpost, it was still home to several million people, but there is no sign of them, and unlike the D’qar base, it looks destroyed. Where there were once shops and food markets there is rubble and the scarring of fire. It doesn’t look like blaster fire, there are no signs of a war, just that one day, everything was reduced to dust. 

He is too numb to cry, and instead they go back to base. They don’t even bother landing on Tavia. The planet is devoid of any life, even on the most sensitive sensor scan. There isn’t a single cockroach or ant crawling on Tavia’s surface.

They get back to D’qar and land. BB-8 runs her post-mission diagnostics, and then pauses.

[!!!Poe!!!!Low Power!!!!] she trills.

Poe jerks his head up from where it was resting on his knees. “What? That shouldn’t be possible. You had 92% power when we left. We’ve been gone less than an hour. Diagnose!”

[!!!!Low Power!!!!] she repeats, her processing light flashing as she tries to process his command. 

He runs over and falls to his knees in front of her. Presses the little manual battery check button, which sure enough, blinks rapidly to indicate imminent power failure.

“No no no no no” he moans, under his breath. “This shouldn’t be happening. Why is this happening? Tell me!”

[!!!CONNECT TO DOCKING STATION!!!!LOW POWER!!!!] BB-8 squarks one last time, and dies. 

He picks her up and looks at her. Shakes her slightly, in case anything sounded like it had been disconnected, but all she gave was the dull thunk of her movement servos being forced to move without electricity. 

He carries her back to his quarters, and places her on the docking station. She’s stuck looking up at him, rather than the neutral position she usually adopts when charging. It’s too much for him, and he grabs her and climbs into bed, and cries for the first time since this ordeal started. 

He falls into a dreamless sleep, and when he wakes he is both starving and furious. 

He tears through the base like an avenging god. There is nothing stopping him now, no reason to keep the home fires burning, to wait to be rescued. He relishes in his prurient fascination for everyone’s secrets. He tears open bedside cabinets, revealing diaries, sex toys, pornography, evidence of illicit affairs, illegal highs. Bathroom cabinets give him more drugs. Inside the tall boots of most of the former Republic officers are illicit bottles of booze, the good shit given by parents and loved ones to commemorate passing out or promotions, traditionally stored there until times of trouble. 

He abandons his quarters and BB-8’s inquisitive, lifeless stare, and moves into the General’s residence with the spoils of his search and has a good go at drinking, smoking and snorting his way into comfortable numbness.

Nothing is sacred. He smokes Han’s cigarettes, he rifles through her underwear drawer, fucks himself to rawness in their bed. He only feels bad when he looks through her desk drawers. He expects to find mementos of Ben and Han, of her lost planet, but he finds nothing, no locks of hair, no love letters, no childish paintings, no crown jewels. There’s a dusty box of medals in the back of the wardrobe, but they were all earned, although he does pin them to himself for amusement's sake. He damages the desk looking for hidden compartments, kicking in side panels and wrenching joints past their flex, but all he finds is a datastick taped to the underside of one drawer, but with no working console it is useless. 

He runs out of drugs quickly, and booze not long after. When the hideous comedown passes, he estimates from the size and openness of the blooms on the General’s plant that it’s been only two weeks. He is filthy and stinking and ravenous, having eaten all of the junk food kept in the quartermaster’s stores rather than cooking and potentially burning everything down. He drags himself to the gravity fresher and lets the cool water pour over him until he feels almost human again. 

When he ventures out into the base again, the seasons have changed, and he is no longer alone.

There is a new transport lying abandoned on the runway. Its owner seemed to have had problems landing it by the ugly gouges in the concrete and the destroyed landing gear, but when he pokes his head inside there is no body, no trail of blood. The seat is cold, but there’s a slight dent in the heavy foam seat that all these transports get when someone spends a lot of time in them. 

“Hello?” he calls, his voice raw. “Hello?”

There is no answer. There are black flickering shapes on the edge of his vision but he can’t deal with those now, he knows that they are unlikely to be real, but that there was a person in this transport, and now they are somewhere in the base, and he is going to find them.

He had kept a list of the corridors that had been lost to the forest on one of the two huge roster boards that he had salvaged from the pitch black of the war room, but now he has final use for the other one.

At the top he wrote ‘HELLO, IF YOU SEE THIS, PLEASE STAY NEARBY! THERE IS FOOD IN THE SPANNER DECK. I WILL RETURN SHORTLY. PLEASE DO NOT HIDE! - POE DAMERON’

He walks the corridors for days, stopping back in the mess every few hours to refill his canteen, eat, and look for evidence that someone else had been through. When he drops by the third time, someone has torn all the shelving out of the long useless fridger. It's a sign, a good sign, and so Poe lines up some of the last cans of good stew and a can opener alongside instructions for heating up on the stove, plus a spoon, and hopes.

He walks until the light fades, and keeps going lit by memory and a small servo powered flashlight. He doesn’t see anyone, but on his last trip past the mess he finds the can empty, and when he gets back to the hanger, there’s something new on the board.

‘OK’, followed by a scrawl he can’t decipher.

He searches the hanger and the nearby rooms until his hand is cramping from squeezing the light, but finds no one, so goes back to his quarters for the first time since his life day experiment. 

He never took BB-8 out of the bed when he left. He worried about leaving her alone, even in her deactivated state. But he need not have worried, because she isn’t alone now. Someone is in his bed, his arms wrapped around her, snoring softly.

He squeezes the light, and the breath dies in his lungs.

Finn. Finn is the one who is asleep in his bed. 

He doesn’t seem to rouse when shaken, and so Poe drags the heavy armchair from the corner of the room, and curls up in it until dawn brings the light.

* * *

Things are no clearer in the light of day.

Finn will not wake to any stimulus, and Poe is loathe to leave his side unless he wakes and wanders off again. He is breathing and he is warm and Poe has not felt the warmth of another human being for over a year. Finn has ugly scars across his face and neck but it is definitely Finn, he would recognise that face anywhere, plus he is still wearing Poe’s jacket, with the long darned seam up the back from when he was sliced half to death. 

Poe has read every book in this room countless times, but he never trashed it, already plagued by all his own secrets, and so the books are still in their careful categorised order. 

He spends a good amount of time staring at the stack of science reference books he lifted from the chief engineer’s office and only flicked through. There is a clarity to his thoughts, somehow, something that he had lost in his fog of loneliness, and in his desk is a thick black pen, and before long he is on his feet, tapping the pen against his lip until it turns black.

Finn wakes in the late afternoon, and when he does the walls are covered in scrawl marks, in complex mathematics trying to explain what Poe already knows.

He stirs, but he doesn’t make a sound. He hisses to catch Poe’s attention, and tries to get out of bed, before falling to the floor with a bang.

Poe’s there, gathering Finn into his arms. “Finn, buddy, I’m so glad to see you.”

“...” Finn mouths words, but no sound comes out. He looks confused. Touches his throat, his lips, eyes terrified. Like his voice should be working, but he’s been put on mute. 

“Shh, shh” Poe says, uselessly, holding him tight, panic running through his veins. He can’t help it, he’s so warm, so comforting, he wants to climb inside him and never leave. Finn wriggles out of his grasp, and grabs the pen off the desk, and scrawls right onto the wood, but the pen’s nib is unsuited for the rough surface, and his fingers are clumsy and unco-ordinated, the pen skittering away under him. Poe scrambles for a marker, something that can write onto the old, battered lacquer, but Finn huffs in frustration and takes off, barrelling out of the room at close to light speed.

Poe finds him in the kitchens, staring at the now empty fridgers and neatly defrosted frozzers. He’s staring at the cans, and his hands, like he can’t work out how to apply one to the other to make them work.

Poe heats the stew on the hob, sets the little table he had dragged into the kitchen to spare himself the echoing horror of the greater mess, even finds a few shelf-stable rolls in the back. He and Finn had shared meals like this so many times, both so hungry they can’t talk for needing to get as much food into themselves as possible, but able to have whole conversations in body language alone. This time, he lets Finn eat both bowls, watches him, a complete lack of any body language to read other than mechanical feeding of a fundamental hunger. At the end, Finn smiles, but there’s nothing behind it but satiety and bland friendliness, the smile of thanks you give a waiter when your meal is under seasoned and not his fault. 

Finn gets up and walks back to bed, and Poe follows a few paces behind, watches him for long moments before going back to scribbling on pads and later the remaining walls. He feels like the problem is opening up for him, blossoming, all the theories that he knows well falling apart under the laws of physics, the laws he knows like the back of his hand that allow him to fly, to travel faster than light, to master space. The math that failed him before, still failing him now, but he’s closer, he knows it, to working out what is happening here. He originally thought maybe he had travelled in time, or fallen into another universe, or was out of phase with the fabric of time, but Finn being here upsets all those theories, upsets the whole goddamn apple cart of theories.

It’s well after dark now, but it doesn’t feel as late as it should. It should still be summer with its long lingering light, but tonight the sun disappeared quickly, equatorially, like the whole place had shifted on its axis in order to take the light faster, faster even than D’Qar’s normal fast transit. He lights the lamp and watches the shadows flicker against the walls and the lumps in his bed, until the unseasonable cold steals into his lungs, and even though the fit is tight, he climbs into bed with Finn and BB-8.

Finn opens his eyes, and for a moment there is something there - something like the old Finn, the real Finn, the one with a spark in his eyes and fire in his belly, and his lips are moving, saying something, over and over again. 

“Poe”, he says. “Poe, Poe, Poe”.

Poe covers his name with his own mouth, closes his eyes to hide from his weakness, but Finn kisses him back, tangles his hands in his hair, rolls Poe onto his back and enthusiastically reciprocates, pinning Poe beneath his strength, his weight, his passion. It’s exactly how Poe imagined it, right down to the huff of laughter, the taste of Finn’s skin, the smell of him. It’s perfect, like Finn is reenacting every little sordid fantasy in perfect detail like its been ripped right from his mind. Poe tastes Finn’s cock on his tongue, down his throat, like he’s done it a thousand times, then feels the unfamiliar feeling of a strange finger in his ass, then another, and another, all nonsensically perfect, followed by a tongue, broad and clever and hot, and then a cock, head huge and extravagantly ridged just hooking inside the perfectly, textbook prepared rim of his ass, before holding there while Poe pants and keens into the pillow for just another minute, _so good_ , _so good for me, I love you, I’ve always loved you, please now, do it now_ , and feels his endless, seemingly impossibly long cock slide home, and fuck him into oblivion, long strokes with perfect tension. On his front he can’t see it, but he feels it all, feels everything he ever wanted, for hours, until the sun is rising, and he feels the warmth as Finn comes inside him, feels it drip out of his ass and down his balls like out of his filthiest dreams, painted in it, covered, and then feels Finn lick it off him, like the worst, dirtiest holo he ever imagined.

He’s shellshocked in the aftermath, panting like he’s run a marathon, sweating and stained and covered in spunk and confusion, exhausted down to his bones. Finn comes back to him, big arms wrapped securely round him, stroking his back as he falls, confused, into sleep.

On the edge of it, he hears Finn say something, something real, a rumble like distant thunder, but sleep takes all sense from him.

When Poe awakes, sore and exhausted, the bed is warm, but Finn isn’t there. Poe walks the base like he did the first day, checks every corner and nook as calm as if he was just doing a normal sweep, until he comes back to his familiar door and catches his reflection in the mirrored name plate. His mouth is gaping open, his eyes sunken in their sockets, ringed in black, covered in dirt from crawling under every bed, from digging in the dirt, tracks clear from where he’s been crying. He realises his throat is sore, sore from screaming.

He goes back in and sees his formulae spread out on the floor, all the pages laid over each other like the blooming of a flower or the crater from a bomb. Across them, in bright red marker, was written a single word. 

_NO._

He tears out of there, runs down to the hanger. He’d kept Black One fuelled, syphoned the fuel out of the pumps with his mouth carefully, over months, kept her tuned up as best he could. She still responds when he climbs into the cockpit, old fashioned that way, runs just as well on switches and mathematics as computers and droids slinging the still-frozen BB-8 into the droid-seat, and he taxis her out and takes off. He doesn’t care where. Doesn’t care how. He has to do the calculations himself without a droid, but he’s good at the math now, he can do it in his sleep. He integrates and compensates for red-shift, and types the parameters into the computer and presses the button, and feels the laws of physics obey him. He jumps to light speed, sets a clock, and waits. 

He spends an hour just watching the stars stream past, numb to their beauty, until he takes her out of the stream, hopeful for something other than the deep blackness of space. There’s enough fuel to do two more jumps, but logically, the vastness of the black, he’ll never actually find another planet. The computer is dead. This is the last working X-Wing in the universe. Despite it all, all the probability in the world, the planet in front of him is green and lush, paradise, a sign from something. 

He enters the atmosphere carefully, and flies at low altitude just above the canopy, looking for a gap in the forest where he could put her down. 

Despite the lushness of the arbourial life, there’s no one to hear his screams when he sees the hanger waiting for him up ahead exactly as he left it, X-Wings lined up in a row, waiting for a crew to come and restore them, looking like a lumpkin patch from the air.

**Author's Note:**

> In order to not go completely mad during the writing up phase of my PhD/society collapsing around me, I'm dusting off all the best things out of my WIP folder and finishing them. I have no memory of what sparked me writing this, or any memory of writing it, which I think has helped contribute to finishing it quickly. I had it all outlined, all prepared, and 3/4 written, and then I just...dropped it. The title of the document was CROATOAN... 
> 
> All of that is true, but I think I just lost interest/started my PhD, and put this in the wrong folder and forgot all about it. I was aiming to write something in the spirit of some of my favourite old fics about entropy failing or being trapped in a simulation, like [in the land of the blind by entanglednow](https://archiveofourown.org/works/202901) or the really creepy bits in Astolat's [Time in a Bottle](https://archiveofourown.org/works/330109). I think it worked?  
> Obviously written before The Last Jedi or The Rise of Skywalker (the latter of which I still haven't even bloody seen, what is my life), but I'll always have a thing for D'Qar base fics, set in that liminal period we lived in during 2016/17, when the world was only just beginning to be awful. 
> 
> Come witness my writing up nervous breakdown/the continuation of WIP Amnesty 2020 over on my tumblr: [cicaklah.tumblr.com](http://cicaklah.tumblr.com)


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